You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.

She apologized, to be sure, but no-one will believe her: she was chilling with her home audience and feeling the warmth, and she said exactly what she thinks. The “Clinton Cash” corruption scandals, the layers of lies about the email server, health problems, and all the other negatives that pile up against the former First Lady are small change compared to this apocalyptic moment of self-revelation.

You can’t win an American presidential election without the deplorables’ vote. Deplorables are America’s biggest minority. They might even be the American majority. They may or not be racist, homophobic and so forth, but they know they’re deplorable. Deplorable, and proud. They’re the median family whose real income has fallen deplorably by 5% in the past ten years, the 35% of adult males who deplorably have dropped out of the labor force, the 40% of student debtors who deplorably aren’t making payments on their loans, the aging state and local government workers whose pension funds are $4 trillion short. They lead deplorable lives and expect that their kids’ lives will be even more deplorable than theirs.

Americans are by and large forgiving people. They’ll forgive Bill for cavorting with Monica “I did not have sex with that woman” Lewinsky in the Oval Office and imposing himself on any number of unwilling females. They might even forgive Hillary for losing tens of thousands of compromising emails on an illegal private server and then repeatedly lying about it in a way that insults the deplorable intelligence of the average voter. But the one thing you can’t do is spit on them and tell them it’s raining. They’ll never forgive you for that. They’re hurting, and they rankle at candidates who rub their faces in it.

Writing at Slate, Ben Zimmer suggests that the “basket of deplorables” construction entered Clinton’s mind by way of analogy with the term “parade of horribles,” which, starting in the 1920s, “entered legal usage as a dismissive term for imagined concerns about a ruling’s negative effects.”

ABC wrote up an article about her peculiar word-choice — “basket of deplorables” — but ignored the far more aggressive “irredeemable” description.

Clinton is a Methodist, and she knows that “everybody is within the mercy and forgiveness of God, and so she’s making, intentionally or not, what sounded like a religious condemnation, a literal judgmental statement,” said Kengor.

When the Catholic Church criticized communists during the Cold War, it described them as “Satanic and poisonous” but not irredeemable, Kengor said. “In Christianity, everybody who is alive and walking on the planet can be redeemed,” he said.

Symbolically, getting exiled as a “irredeemable” is “worse than being exiled to Siberia [by the Soviet government] because you have the hope some day of being let out of Siberia … even in Siberia, hope didn’t die,” he said.

In September 2001, just after the 9/11 atrocity, Kengor said, George W. Bush was excoriated by Democrats for his hard-edged statement, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Liberals complained “‘How dare he use that kind of biblical language’ — but this is what Hillary is doing here,” he said.

But while Bush’s “with us” phrase assumed that enemies are human enough to choose to sides, Clinton’s “irredeemable” word denies that her political enemies have the human power of choice, he added. Bush “would never use ‘irredeemable’ … [because, for Christians] you can be a evildoer – and still repent and be redeemed,” Kengor said.

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Clinton’s unprecedented use of the “irredeemable” term, said Kengor, “is not getting the attention that it should, maybe because in part, secular liberalism doesn’t really understand religious language … [irredeemable] is really worse than the word ‘deplorable.’”

“Everybody is within the mercy and forgiveness of God, and and she’s making — intentionally or not, what sounded like a religious condemnation, a literal judgmental statement… it really should get more attention than the ‘deplorable’ statements,” Kengor said.